Absolutely No Pressure: Continuing a Successful Game Series with Civilization VI

[@booketoiles1600]

Great talk, it's nice to see the difference between the way the fans analyze the game and the designers : fan complaint about stuff like "this feature I like isn't there" instead of asking "would this feature adress the shortcomings of the game*

[@carrottoponcrak]

bookman B. Yeah but.......... it would've been nice to have that feature though

[@ZoidbergForPresident]

Yeah but if it doesn't resolve an issue, it's utterly useless, right?

[@booketoiles1600]

yeah, like adding the world congress for the sake of adding the world congress.

[@juelztadeo4391]

you prolly dont give a shit but if you are bored like me during the covid times then you can watch all the new movies on instaflixxer. Been streaming with my girlfriend for the last couple of days :)

[@cohenjadiel9558]

@Juelz Tadeo Definitely, been using instaflixxer for since december myself :)

[@AndrewWhitsed]

Watching this after 2 expansions, new frontiers and other dlc and civ 6 is, imho, the best in the series. Lots of unique civs that create unique play styles or decisions and adjacencies of districts and planning your cities is great. Barbarian clan mode is fantastic. A do use a couple of mods to help with planning your city, tells you adjacency bonus on pins, and which policies to choose, tells you what gold or science or culture etc. bonus you get from picking a policy instead of having to work it out yourself, two better trade mods one to better organise trade routes and the other better trading between civs. I also often play with secret societies and monopolies/corporation modes too. Just a very good game now.

[@zenteapot]

It's a great and revealing talk. Just some very personal thoughts: The unstacked city system is great for immersion, and the angle from Civ 5 is refreshing. But the way it is designed has some annoyances: a) Fixing stuff with workers is painful! that should have been collapsed with the town management. b) No build queue. Honestly can't understand this. c) It requires a lot of memorization for later stage wonders, when you can't really be sure if there will be a spot for it. The sailing tech example and reasoning behind it is understandable. But still, civ is a rather abstract game, a lot of stuff are reduced to mere symbols to fit well with the gameplay. Emphasizing the immersion angle on a specific tech seems a bit stretched. The biggest problem with Eureka is it encourages you to do a checklist of things are not that interesting after you've been playing for a while. It looks great initially, even works pretty well in the first few games, but quickly becomes repetition, and effectively punitive if you don't follow it(fall behind in tech). One way to address it maybe, is to add randomization to the eureka requirements, to make it feel a bit more varied and reduce the fatigue, or even better, randomize the tech tree a little bit, move around the branches and requirements a little. Civics tree has the same eureka system and as a result the same problem. And the civic tree runs parallel to the tech tree, creating a whole new tree structure to get familiar with, effectively doubling the cognitive load. It might be better to just attach the civic nodes to the tech tree, as dead ends that players can choose to research or not, and call it something like "civilization tree", or integrate it into the tech tree with some randomization every game to create interesting situations that players must adapt to. The problem with the policy selection is that the policies are too incremental. Situationally there are a lot of choices, but there is no long term commitment, and the choices do not feel important enough. Usually there are a couple of optimal choices that you can pick without filling the full policy slots. It's like a set of buffs you choose and reconfigure every once in a while with little to no cost, which pretty much kills the weight of these choices. Civ 6 unit movement is awkward, regardless how it is explained. the xcom comparison is off because you only control a few units in xcom, while in civ you could easily go up to 10+ units and cities in mid game. The number of 'units' that need player attention only increases as you go. Personally I feel the solution is not to go back to civ 5 style, but to add more mobility to all the units(one extra move). Right now it just feels sluggish overall.

[@somethingsomething7507]

I know your comment is 2 years old, but no one has replied so far. The building queue not being in the game is actually very logical. You unlock much during the course of the game and so the priorities you might have as a player will vary too often to make any building queue have any meaningful impact. I do find it weird that you complain about late stage wonders requiring too much memorization, but dont mind the memorization required for the eureka. That's an interesting contradiction. But to stay on topic, you can look up the build requirements for wonders ingame, and since it's the late stage wonders bothering you the most, those are the ones you have the most time to prepare for. So I don't really understand the issue here. While talking about wonders, I really hated how every game in civ V people could rush the wonders (me included). Since I was almost always able to build the best wonders first, I often had to ask people I played with if they wanted to go for any specific wonders so I could let them have a couple. You also find Eureka to be nothing more than a personal checklist that you must go through or you feel like you are left behind. The fact is that not all maps and starting positions will be able to give you many of the eureka bonuses. And this is ok. In fact, it plays a big part in how the game is different each time you play. And every player will be struggling to a certain degree. So if you want to hit each eureka that is entirely up to you, but you falling behind is not the game's fault. It's your personal strategy in a strategy game that just backfires. btw, it is a very weird to ask for randomized eureka requirements when you just watched a man explain it was difficult thinking up every single one of them. The civ 6 movement is actually very logical and not awkward at all. To move to rough terrain, it requires at least 2 movement points. You wanting to do it for only 1 is what's really weird. You are just too used to civ V which let you cheat the system. And while having preferences are ok, calling something awkward and then come up with a non-solution is what makes this even weirder. How is 1 more movement point going to help? You can then move 3 plain spaces each costing 1. Once you moved 2 spaces, you will have 1 point remaining and your unit will still not be able to go up that hill for your last step.

[@jgcooper]

"Culturevating" is reduntant... culture is already what's cultivated. That's why it's called "culture".

[@ZoidbergForPresident]

:D

[@SilentS0lid]

great talk. haven't played civ 6 that much yet. but from what i have played, i really like most of the changes.

[@timduke4616]

The two big things I wish CIV 6 did was allow you to play every map and civ on standard mode and second is up the base value for science…I find myself restarting a lot to have mountains so my science can keep up which don’t allow me to really enjoy the randomizing of the maps..just my opinion tho

[@Chadhogan111]

Bunch of snide, irrelevant, passive aggressive questions by the audience at the end

[@KingYurtleOfTurtle]

@Bob Oakshields People forget how negatively civ 6 was recieved when it first released. Some of that is valid, each preceding civ game has years of balancing, improvements, and expansions, and they have to get rid of that polish and start from scratch each sequel so they can build back better. But also some of the complaints are just angry fanboys, like the guy during the Q&A who was mad that the narrator didn't call him a good boy when he built a wonder, or blaming the lead designer for a typo in an obscure civlopedia entry.

[@ZoidbergForPresident]

I'm among those who don't like the direction taken by civ6. Leaning WAAAYYY too much on armed conflict.

[@couriersix2445]

ZoidbergForPresident Yeah. I haven't been a fan so far. The art style seems like a step back from the last two games as well.

[@booketoiles1600]

Well you're gonna like the expansion, the Loyalty mechanic puts a big brake on rapid conquest, and the Emergencies can be the death of a warmonger.

[@ZoidbergForPresident]

Meh, really not sure about that... at least by the looks of the new leaders and their warmongery bonuses. Maybe I'll let myself be tempted but at no more than 10€, maybe.

[@booketoiles1600]

Oh yeah, the R&F Leaders are definitely too war focused, I know that's because they wanted to stick to a rise and fall theme with civs, and generally civilizations which did that were war like, but yeah.

[@ZoidbergForPresident]

Well, I think the base game is too war focused. It's conflict after conflict and I find that levying an army is the go all solution to any issue. And that's just not how I want to play this game. :P

[@koalabrownie]

10 minutes to say "gee I felt pressure".

[@hekatekekate2587]

I quit gaming because civ 4-5 this. 6 looks like 5 with more pretension and less work on creating a new experience. I got into game development because of this, good luck keeping the market old men.